Carlton Moss (February 14, 1909 – August 10, 1997) was an African-American screenwriter, actor and film director. Moss directed the documentary ''Frederick Douglass: The House on Cedar Hill''.

Biography

Moss was raised in both

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...

and Newark. He attended

Morgan State University Morgan State University (Morgan State or MSU) is a public historically black research university in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the largest of Maryland's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). In 1867, the university, then known a ...

, where he formed an acting troupe called "Toward a Black Theater". In 1936 he was one of a triumvirate of African-American theatre artists who led the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project after the departure of John Houseman. Houseman recommended Moss for the position, later describing him as "skillful, progressive, educated and sensitive to every changing breeze of Harlem opinion." Moss directed a successful production of ''

The Show-Off ''The Show-Off'' is a 1924 stage play by George Kelly about a working-class North Philadelphian family's reluctance to accept their daughter's suitor Aubrey Piper, an overly confident Socialist buffoon. The play has been revived five times on Bro ...

'' (1937), its first presentation under the new leadership, at the Lafayette Theatre. Later he wrote '' The Negro Soldier'' for Frank Capra, a 1944 propaganda film encouraging racial harmony among

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

soldiers and specifically encouraging African-American men to enlist. After this film he became an important figure in independent cinema of

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

s. In 1944 Moss went to Europe and made the film ''Teamwork'', a documentary about the work of an African-American quartermaster unit known as "The Redball Express". He had the chance to work with Elia Kazan on '' Pinky'' but left the project, as he felt it demeaning to blacks. He later taught as a guest lecturer at Fisk University in Nashville and as a professor at the University of California at Irvine in the Comparative Culture Program, and made educational films about African-American history.Black Film Center
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Filmography

* ''The Negro Soldier'' (1943) * ''Teamwork'' (1944) * ''Frederick Douglass: The House on Cedar Hill'' (1953) * ''George Washington Carver'' (1959) * ''Black Genesis: The Art of Tribal Africa'' (1970) * ''Portraits in Black: Paul Laurence Dunbar: America's First Black Poet'' (1972) * ''The Afro-American Artist'' (1976) * ''Portraits in Black:

Two Centuries of Black American Art ''Two Centuries of Black American Art'' was a 1976 traveling exhibition of African-American art organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It "received greater visibility and validation from the mainstream art world than any other ...

'' (1976) * ''Portraits in Black: The Gift of the Black Folk'' (1978) * ''All the World's A Stage'' (1979) * ''Drawings from Life: Charles White'' (1980) * ''Forever Free'' (1983)

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Moss, Carlton 1909 births 1997 deaths African-American film directors American film directors Morgan State University alumni Writers from Newark, New Jersey Federal Theatre Project administrators Male actors from Newark, New Jersey 20th-century African-American people